New location for #Perseverance on Sol 1144, RMC 52.1950.
This may be the last location visible by #Ingenuity's RTE camera, as the rover has now reached the theoretical limit of its field-of-view (cyan line). The #MarsHelicopter has been programmed to capture one RTE image every sol for as long as it is able to wake up every sol perform its routine of gathering environmental and system data, as a stationary testbed.
@stim3on I have a question about one of your other pictures and maybe this has been already discussed - but I couldn't find any chatter on it.
You did the view of Ingenuity from Perseverance's perspective a few weeks ago. Having seen a brief note that NASA discovered one of the blades broke completely off, I looked at that picture to see if I could see where they may have bounced... I think a piece is over on the left here. Has that been already covered? #ingenuity#mars#nasa
This animation shows one of the rotor blades before and after the #MarsHelicopter's 72nd landing. The fact that the image with the broken blade had to shrink and change perspective so much to match the other one is an indication of the RTE camera being much closer to the ground after landing 72.
The helicopter was already out of sight and at a distance of ~1km, as seen in the map below. There is an obstructing mound about midway that rises 13m above the line-of-sight, which might be the reason for the loss of signal. Despite that, assuming Ingenuity's landing software worked as usual, the helicopter may be in good health, but
During a short up and down Flight 72, Mars helicopter Ingenuity lost its comm link with rover Perseverance. NASA engineers are working on restoring it.
This follows Flight 71 on Jan 6 which made an emergency landing 35 seconds into a 125 sec flight; apparently the relatively featureless sandy terrain proved difficult for its navigation system.
Meanwhile, Voyager 1 is still sending garbled data.
Mars helicopter Ingenuity communicates with rover Perseverance using the ultra-low-power Zibgee protocol standard over a 914 MHz link.
Data rate: 250 kbps
Range: up to 1 km
Antenna: Monopole, omni-directional, 7.3 cm tall, 1 mm thick, gold-plated stainless steel.
Electronics: Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) radio and processor elements, not radiation hardened.
Good news from JPL - the Mars helicopter team managed to reestablish contact with Ingenuity after its comm loss since the middle of Flight 72. The team is reviewing data to better understand the root cause of the comm outage.
This was accomplished by instruction Mars rover Persevere "to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal."